The low-cost test before you quit: Stay Employed, Start Smart.

That is allowed. Entirely allowed. This is a book about deciding well rather than about resigning, and if a competing employer solves the whole thing for the price of a better title and a shorter commute, you have your answer and it cost you three afternoons. Just notice what happened, because the problem was the employer.

From chapter 5: Stuck is not the same as ready

Because there's no industry selling it to you. Enormous businesses exist to help you start something. Almost nothing exists to tell an employed person that a plumbing firm with eleven staff is for sale forty minutes away, and the people who do know are brokers paid on completion, which is a reason to read them carefully rather than a reason to ignore them.

From chapter 11: Buy the business instead of building it

That is how the book looks at “the low-cost test before you quit”: one idea at a time, with a step you can take right away. Of course, this is only one idea from the book. So, if this passage speaks to you, the full chapter goes further, and it ends with an exercise you can do the same evening.

In short, the book has 14 chapters, and each one ends with a practical exercise. Therefore, you can read it in order, or you can go straight to the part about “the low-cost test before you quit”.

1. Only one kind of self-employment pays
2. The forty-five-year-old founder
3. The salary is not a number
4. What you are actually buying
5. Stuck is not the same as ready
6. You are guessing how it will feel, and the guess is wrong
7. Why you have not decided already
8. The job might be the problem, and a business might not be the answer
9. Do not leap. overlap.
10. What the double life costs
11. Buy the business instead of building it
12. One stranger, one payment, while you still have the job
13. Staying is allowed, and it can be the win
14. A decision you can defend later

Finally, you can get Stay Employed, Start Smart: The Low-Cost Test Before You Quit in the stores below. Because every title of this book shares the same text, you can simply pick the one you like best. Also, the book is available in 19 languages.

In addition, each title below highlights a different idea from the same book. So, pick the one that speaks to you.

• The Employed Entrepreneur: How to Test a Business Without Losing Your Job
• Don't Hand In Your Notice Yet: The Employed Person's Startup Test
• The Two-Year Wall: Why Side-Builders Survive and Salary-Jumpers Don't
• The Side-Business Validation Plan: Keep the Wage, Test the Dream, Then Jump
• I Want to Be My Own Boss, but I Need My Salary: Test First, Quit Later
• Your Paycheck Is Not the Obstacle: How to Build a Business While Employed
• The 96-Hour Business Test: Validate Your Idea Before You Quit Your Job
• Before You Hand In Your Notice: How to Test a Business While You Still Have a Job
• The Job You Can't Quit Is Your Cheapest Startup Lab: 14 One-Evening Tests Before You Risk Your Paycheck
• Keep Your Salary, Build Your Business: The Employed Person's Guide to Testing a Startup Before You Quit

See all 19 titles. Go to the book page.